Answer to Question #24289 in Inorganic Chemistry for Abdul rehman

2013-02-12T08:30:58-0500

Question #24289

How many elements have discovered in nature? not only on earth crust but the whole nature.

Expert's answer

2013-02-14T08:28:41-0500

As of November 2011, 118 elements have been identified, the latest being ununseptium in 2010. Of the 118 known elements, only the first 98 are known to occur naturally on Earth; 80 of them are stable, while the others are radioactive, decaying into lighter elements over various timescales from fractions of a second to billions of years. Those elements that do not occur naturally on Earth have been produced artificially as the synthetic products of man-made nuclear reactions.